Kill a feature, “Fix” a feature

Dave McClure, of Startup Metrics for Pirates fame, often recommends the seemingly drastic step of killing features, just to see what happens. If users freak out, then that’s a valuable feature, put it back in. If not, well, you just made your product better, separating the chaff from the wheat.

Now most folk are going to be hesitant to take such a drastic step, and might be a hard sell to management or the rest of the team. Here’s an alternative I think might work:

Fix a Feature

What I mean by “fix” is that you take that feature and all of its buttons and inputs, as well as user flows, error messages and edge cases, and turn it into a sensible default.

• Profile picture? A link with their name is good enough.
• 20 different social networks to choose from? Add Facebook & Twitter, and be done.
• Multiple users per account? They can share 1 account.

Most times (and I know I do this a lot, being product-focused), we believe that customers won’t love us if we don’t build in 1,000 ways to customize the product. And each time we start down that road, we create a whole mess of wireframes, workflows, tests, and feedback that we need to work through.

When customers start to balk about needing more freedom — when they’re annoyed they can’t do something they really need to do — you’ve just validated a need, and learned something about how your customers work.

Lean Startup Update: January '10 Edition

Feature freeze!

Here at HeyIndie HQ, we’ve been following the principles of lean startup development, as outlined by Steve Blank, Eric Ries, and Sean Ellis. I don’t think we’re following to the letter, but you do your best when bootstrapping. I feel good about getting out of the office to meet with potential customers on a regular basis, and being really focused when it comes to our feature set.

So far, we’re learning a lot about how our customers work: what their needs and pain points are. There’s a lot more to customer interviews, of course, but we’re not quite there yet. In addition, being bootstrapped means we’re still working on other projects, and sometimes, progress can be slow. But extra time can also be your friend, allowing ideas to ferment and the best ones to bubble up to the top.

At the center of all this, we want to build a great product. Something that’s clearly useful and fun to use. Riffing off Andrew Chen’s post, Minimum Desirable Product, I can see where we are mixing and matching strategies to suit our situation. We are very focused on design and user experience, for example, since that’s our core competency. This is a bit dangerous, because we’re reacting to our own tendencies, not the market, but again, if possible, you always want to make the best impression possible. It’s a balancing act.

We’ve been working on this product for about 4 months now, 3 if you don’t count December, which was pretty much a wash given the holidays (again, bootstrapping has its minuses). But I feel like we’ve been focused on our initial product vision and getting to alpha testing.

So, what haven’t we done?

• No payment processing. It’s definitely our goal to launch as a subscription service. But we have to make it through an invite-only alpha first, and we don’t need to charge anyone for that. We have a couple possible subscription management vendors in mind, both with simple RESTful interfaces, so integrating payments when we need to will be a snap.
• No “fun” features: We have some great ideas to give the service some extra “kick” in the fun pants. But those are complicated feature sets that we don’t fully understand yet.
• No advanced analytics: We’re collecting a lot more data than we’re displaying right now. But we know we don’t want to be Google Analytics, so we want to be very strategic about adding new stats.
• No mobile support: We’re going to need this at some point, but until we gather some data, we won’t know how important this feature really is. Better to wait and see.
• No platforms: It would be easy to get caught up in building plugins and interfaces, but we’re going to wait until we know who our customers are.